J.D. over at Get Rich Slowly asked me for a guest post on personal finance. What it turned out I wanted to talk about next, though, was productivity--and in particular, my evolving experience with Getting Things Done.

I spent many years working for various companies that, like most businesses, were more or less dysfunctional. They were places where priorities constantly shifted, where every day brought a new emergency, and where managers and peers might show up at any time with something urgent that needed my attention. When I became a full-time writer, I discovered that I needed different ways to manage my time than the ones that had worked when I was an employee. Interestingly, the different ways that seem to work best for me aren’t new at all — they’re the old classic tools of time management.

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Hi again Phil. Great article. The first thing that popped in my head after reading it was how thankful I am that I have finally found a not-so-dysfunctional work place. Having worked at Motorola with you for a few years I know exactly the kind of frustration you're talking about. Although I have to admit, believe it or not, that Motorola was actually the 2nd most functional place I've worked out of 4 of the last 5 jobs.

I don't know if you're aware but since leaving Motorola I've been bouncing around quite a bit here on the east coast. I've worked for Siemens, Quest Diagnostics, United Health Group, and now Accenture. You haven't seen dysfunctional until you've taken the typical waterfall software development model that you and I were subjected to with fairly poor project management and add three levels of government auditing that these various health industry companies have to deal with.

Accenture on the other hand has been a breath of fresh air for me. It's a huge consulting firm, but I've found a small shop that has recently been acquired by them (reminding me quite a bit of when I joined Motorola) that has been doing Agile software development with Scrum for the past 3-4 years and fairly successfully.

If you or any of your readers haven't had the opportunity to work in a shop that uses Scrum for project management, software industry or not, I highly recommend it. I think of it as GTD for teams. Every day I stand up in a 15 meeting talk about what I got done the day before and what I'm going to do that day. And amazingly enough it's usually actually what I get to work on. Every month we talk about what we accomplished the month before and then what we're going to do for the next month. And the picture is usually pretty close.

All teams of this success of course depends on the quality of the people and their dedication to the process we're using, but I got to tell you, I'm happier in this job than I've ever been.